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Brave New Stepfamilies 01-Stewart.qxd 11/28/2006 6:29 PM Page 1 ONE BRAVE NEW STEPFAMILIES hat comes to mind when you hear the word stepfamily? Before you Wanswer, consider the following scenarios: • Rhonda and her boyfriend, Al, have a child, Emily. The couple’s rela- tionship doesn’t work out and Al moves out of state. He has no contact with his daughter and pays no child support. Rhonda meets Peter and they marry. Peter adopts Emily. • Carol and Randy are divorced. Carol has custody of their two children, Emma and Sophia. After a few months of dating, Carol’s boyfriend, Roger, moves in with Carol and the girls. • Bobby lives with his mother, Elaine. Bobby’s father, Doug, has remar- ried Leslie. The couple lives with Leslie’s children from her first mar- riage, Teddy, Austin, and Abbey. Bobby sees his father every other weekend, usually for a movie and a bite to eat. Sometimes Leslie and her children go along (depending on what’s showing). • Janet is married to Ron and the couple has two sons, Billy and Justin. Janet falls in love with Ann, a coworker, and divorces Ron. Ann moves in with Janet, Billy, and Justin. The boys refer to her as “Aunt Ann.” • Rosemary is divorced and has three college-aged children, Sarah, Ben, and Lily. Rosemary meets James, a widower, at a retirement party and after a two-week courtship, they fly off to Las Vegas and get married. James has a grown son, Todd. The kids get together and plan a recep- tion for the couple. 1 01-Stewart.qxd 11/28/2006 6:29 PM Page 2 2 BRAVE NEW STEPFAMILIES Which of these families is a stepfamily? Which family members did you include, and what criteria did you use to decide? The opinions of undergradu- ate students on this issue vary widely. The discussion typically goes like this: “Definitely Rhonda and Peter, because he adopted Emily, but not Rosemary and James, because the kids are grown up and out of the household.” Or, “‘Yes,’ to Bobby, because he sees his father pretty frequently, but ‘no’ to Carol and Roger, because they are not married.” Then, someone inevitably pipes up, “But using marriage as a criterion is not fair to Janet and Ann, because, being lesbians, they can’t legally marry (in most states).” Students tend to enjoy this debate, because it gets at the core of our very personal and deeply held ideas about the meaning of family in American society. Many students offer the sto- ries of friends and relatives who are in the same situations as the people described in the vignettes. Many students talk about being in, or having been in, a similar situation themselves. I have never had a class be in complete agreement about any of them. You may be surprised to find out that, among family scholars, there is also a distinct lack of agreement about what constitutes a stepfamily. Moreover, an examination of published research on stepfamilies would lead one to conclude that the majority of stepfamily scholars do not consider any of these situations stepfamilies. Despite variation in legal marriage, residential status, sexual orientation, and the rest, these different scenarios have something important in common: the absence of a biological relationship between one’s children and one’s serious romantic partner. In this book, I argue that this is what makes a stepfamily.1 What social and demographic shifts are causing this to happen? Among them are a growth in the number of women having children outside of marriage, an increase in couples with children “living together,” increases in nonresident parent involvement and the shared physical custody of children after divorce, the aging of the population, increasing racial and ethnic diversity, and increas- ing awareness and tolerance of lesbian and gay relationships. I propose that family scientists (and the public) adopt a broader definition of the stepfamily, one that acknowledges these social and demographic shifts, highlights stepfam- ily diversity, and reflects the current realities of Americans’ lives. In fact, under a broader definition of the stepfamily, remarried couples with stepchildren under 18 living in the household (the traditional definition of a stepfamily) would actu- ally account for a minority of all stepfamilies (Stewart, 2001). 01-Stewart.qxd 11/28/2006 6:29 PM Page 3 Brave New Stepfamilies 3 Photo 1.1 Stepfamilies of the 21st century face many new challenges. © LWA-Dann Tardif/Corbis. I am not the first to take a broader perspective on stepfamilies. In their most recent book, leading stepfamily scholars Lawrence Ganong and Marilyn Coleman make a similar argument (Ganong & Coleman, 2004). Family demog- rapher Larry Bumpass and his colleagues did the same a decade ago when they proposed that stepfamilies incorporate trends in out-of-wedlock childbearing and cohabitation (Bumpass, Raley, & Sweet, 1995). It is important to note that while many stepfamily researchers may have wanted to use a broader definition 01-Stewart.qxd 11/28/2006 6:29 PM Page 4 4 BRAVE NEW STEPFAMILIES of stepfamilies, they were constrained by the definition used by our official source of information on the United States population, the U.S. Census. Tradi- tionally, the U.S. Census has defined stepfamilies in terms of marriages and households, and this practice continues today (U.S. Census, 2005a, 2005b). The purpose of this book is to examine new and diverse kinds of stepfamilies and to discuss what is known, and what is unknown, about them in relation to our cur- rent knowledge base. Students and researchers will receive basic information about stepfamily structure, theory, dynamics, and processes while being exposed to “invisible” stepfamilies and “hidden” stepfamily members. This book is unique in its breadth, macrolevel perspective, and attention to diversity in the areas of family structure, gender, age, race and ethnicity, and sexual identity. THE EVOLUTION OF AN INSTITUTION Social, economic, and demographic changes have occurred over the 20th cen- tury, especially in the past three decades or so, which have produced funda- mental changes in the nature stepfamily life. However, it is difficult to think about the evolution of the American stepfamily without first considering how the American family itself has evolved and is evolving. Like the stepfamily, the American family has become more diverse and more complex. Consequently, we now realize that there is no, and has never been, a “standard” American family (Coontz, 1992). The term family more than ever before represents a mosaic of family forms. In fact, the so-called traditional family—the kind characterized so humor- ously by The Simpsons, with the female parent focused on the home and domes- tic tasks and the male parent focused on earning an income—is now a distinct minority (Kain, 1990). According to data from the 2002 Current Population Survey (CPS), traditional breadwinner-homemaker families like these repre- sented only 7% of all U.S. households (Population Reference Bureau, 2003; see Figure 1.1). Today, no one family form dominates over all others. One often hears of the “divorce revolution” as the primary reason for this situation, but trends in divorce and other family-related patterns are themselves the effects of still other social forces. Drawing from a wide range of longitudinal data, Andrew Cherlin (1992) pieced together an explanation for the American family’s long-term trend toward diversification. Cherlin argued that technological advancement in the United States (industrialization followed by growth in 01-Stewart.qxd 11/28/2006 6:29 PM Page 5 Brave New Stepfamilies 5 Traditional 7% Dual-income, with children 16% Dual-income, no children 13% Other 64% Figure 1.1 Types of U.S. Households, 2002 SOURCE: Ameristat analysis of data from the 2002 Current Population Survey (March supplement) (Population Reference Bureau, 2003). Used with permission of Population Reference Bureau. Copyright © 2003. U.S. Nuclear Meltdown. Top Panel only, “Types of U.S. Households, 2002.” NOTE: “Traditional” households include married-couple households with children in which only the husband is in the labor force. service-type jobs) has gradually changed women’s work roles, increasingly imbuing them with economic opportunities that give married women greater economic independence from their husbands and an incentive for leaving an unhappy marriage, thereby promoting a long-term rise in the divorce rate. It is difficult for us, in the first decade of a new millennium, to appreciate the significance of the technological change behind this trend. Most of us have no concrete impression of living in a “household of production,” in which all family members, including children, contribute to their own survival by work- ing. It is hard to relate to a time when fathers and sons created food through farming and animal domestication, and mothers and daughters turned slaugh- tered hogs into sausages and spun wool into yarn. Commercial enterprises take care of those tasks for us, and work usually takes place outside the home. Consequently, with our cookouts and holiday celebrations, DVDs, digital tele- vision, cell phones, and online shopping, we center our families on consump- tion rather than on production, and husbands’ and wives’ economic roles are no longer as interdependent as they once were (Hutter, 1998). Marriage is rarely necessary for economic survival, and divorce less often results in eco- nomic devastation. Consequently, men and women are no longer as compelled to stay married or get married in the first place. 01-Stewart.qxd 11/28/2006 6:29 PM Page 6 6 BRAVE NEW STEPFAMILIES Trends in Divorce Figure 1.2 shows the historical trend in the divorce rate over the last century or so as presented by Cherlin (1992). The long-term rise in the divorce rate has exhibited changes that suggest that more than technological change has driven family evolution.
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